1. art and entertainment
2. music
3. music genres
4. opera

SSCM - AHS Joint Meeting
April 23-26, 2015
Iowa City
Abstracts
Thursday Afternoon
I. Plenary Session: Baroque Lives
Roger Freitas (Eastman School of Music), Chair
Supereminet omnes: New Light on the Life and Career of Vittoria Tarquini
Beth Glixon (University of Kentucky)
Vittoria Tarquini is known especially among Handel enthusiasts as the
composer’s would-be paramour during his time in Florence in 1708; indeed, her
relationship with Handel has taken on even greater significance over the last few decades
as questions regarding the composer’s sexuality have been raised. The singer also
occupies a niche in a particular corner of Florentine history as the supposed mistress of
Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici. Using newly discovered archival and visual
material as well as a wide range of secondary sources, my paper traces Tarquini’s life and
operatic career in Italy and Germany before looking at her years of retirement in Venice,
where she died in 1746.
Tarquini’s performance at Venice’s famed Teatro S. Giovanni Grisostomo in
1688 put her under the influence of the powerful Grimani family, and through Vincenzo
Grimani she made the acquaintance of Prince Ferdinando, who would become her patron
and employer ten years later. Rather than continuing her career in Venice, she moved to
Hanover later in 1688, and soon married the French concertmaster Jean-Baptiste Farinel.
She subsequently spent a number of years singing in Naples, where she was a favorite of
the Viceroy, the Duke of Medinaceli. While there she sang in various works of
Alessandro Scarlatti, and premiered the title role in Il trionfo di Camilla, which became
one of the most popular operas of the eighteenth century. She would continue to sing in
Scarlatti’s operas in Florence.
Tarquini’s life invites us to consider issues beyond career and repertoire: it raises
questions of marital responsibility, infidelity, and maternity. Much of what has been
“said” about Vittoria Tarquini over the past 200 years turns out to be filled with
inaccuracies, many of which persist today in the literature. My paper presents a new
picture of this fascinating singer whose life would be enriched in various ways after her
encounter with Prince Ferdinando in Venice at the beginning of her career.
Rosenmüller in Exile: Traces of a Shadowed Life
John H. Roberts (University of California, Berkeley)
In 1655, Johann Rosenmüller fled from Leipzig after being accused of having homosexual relations with some of his students at the Thomasschule. Soon he turned up in Venice, and he remained in Italy until shortly before his death in 1684, when he returned to Germany as Kapellmeister in Wolfenbüttel. During his long exile he composed a wealth of Latin church music and published two instrumental collections, but his life in Italy has remained largely a blank. We know only that in January 1658 he was hired as a trombonist at St. Mark’s and that from 1677 to 1682 he served as house composer at the Ospedale della Pietà; it has also been claimed that he was maestro di coro at the Pietà from 1658 until 1677. A newly discovered Rosenmüller signature suggests, however, that he took part in an opera performance near Rome in 1673. Previously unreported records show that he was not employed at the Pietà between 1671 and 1677. He may have left Venice when he did because in 1673-­‐74 there was no opera season at the Teatro San Luca, where he had perhaps been playing in the orchestra. By September 1674, he was back in
Venice, in good time for the resumption of opera at San Luca in December. This paper challenges the assumption that Rosenmüller was primarily associated with the Pietà during his years in Venice and lends support to the idea that while in Italy he was actively involved in the performance of opera, a possible explanation for the operatic influences that have been detected in his church music. Girolamo Gigli and the Professionalization of Opera in Siena
Colleen Reardon (University of California, Irvine)
The landscape for operatic production in Siena during the late seventeenth century
divides into two periods: the first dominated by the Chigi family and the second, by the
playwright and librettist Girolamo Gigli. Gigli came of age during the 1670s, when opera
was taking hold in his native city; in his mid-twenties, he began to write operatic librettos
for performance by students at the Collegio Tolomei. As Chigi influence in public opera
waned, he stepped into the void. New documentation allows us to follow the vicissitudes
of his career during the mid-to-late 1690s and the early 1700s. In an autograph letter from
1697, Gigli shows his frustration at the dearth of good musical settings of his librettos.
His misfortune in that field might have led him to adopt the role of impresario in Siena, in
which he attempted to transform opera from a sociable enterprise into a professional,
moneymaking operation. He encountered a number of obstacles along the way, most
notably an academic culture that either did not understand the difference between
competence and virtuosity in musical performance or did not want to pay for that
difference, and a public that associated opera with a festive culture connected to visits of
the Chigi. Notwithstanding these difficulties, his tenure as impresario of public operas in
Siena produced a number of innovations in the way business was done. For example, he
successfully petitioned to raise the orchestra pit in the public theater so that singers could
better hear the instrumentalists and he appears to have designed the first known printed
contract for singers. Gigli was not just a businessman, however; he was also an excellent
judge of vocal talent and we can credit him with launching the career of Francesco
Bernardi, who went on to fame and fortune as the great Senesino.
Friday Morning
II. AHS Session: Handel’s Heroes
Nathan Link (Centre College), Chair
Handelian Heroics
Jonathan Rhodes Lee (University of Chicago)
Handel’s oratorios provide rich sites for broadening an already robust discourse
about the role of heroism in eighteenth-century English art. The most common claim
among scholars of the poetry, prose, and drama of Handel’s contemporaries is that this
role was severely limited; they often describe this literature with phrases like “antiheroic
propaganda campaign,” refer to the “disappearance of heroic man” within it, or even
assert that it was written during “an age without a hero.” As literary historians are quick
to point out, Handel’s English contemporaries were generally too busy producing antiheroes (Gay’s Captain Macheath, Defoe’s Jonathan Wild the Great) and idealized
gentlemen of distinctly everyman proportions (Lillo’s George Barnwell, Richardson’s
Mr. B) to concern themselves much with grandiose heroics. And some scholars
(including most recently Elaine McGirr) have asserted that the burly hero was abandoned
because of his association with Dryden and the Restoration court, hence not only
outmoded but potentially seditious in the years following the Glorious Revolution.
My essay demonstrates that the oratorios offer additions and slight correctives to
the literary history described above. First, it shows that when certain political
circumstances allowed—namely, when there was an identifiable Catholic threat to the
Protestant regime—rugged, active heroes still had their place during the Georgian period.
Second, it demonstrates that some of Handel’s contemporaries held the moral
accomplishments of their modest protagonists as examples of a distinct sort of heroism.
The oratorios provide useful illustrations of these two contrasting modes, encompassing
both a familiar “action heroism” and what writers in the eighteenth century specifically
called “Christian heroism,” reflecting various political and religious contexts. These
contexts, of course, influenced Handel’s musical decisions, leading to distinctive sounds
of heroism that match the dramatic models his librettists offered. In exploring these two
heroic modes in the oratorios, I draw on examples from Judas Maccabaeus (1746) and
Theodora (1750), while pointing toward directions for future research. Finally, the essay
explains how these musical settings of active and Christian heroism also allowed Handel
himself by the end of his career to achieve the status of national, musical, and moral hero.
How to Enrage Alexander, or Towards an Understanding of Recitativo Semplice and
Theatrical Gesture
Regina Compton (Eastman School of Music)
Any capable singer in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries knew something
about the visual components of performance. Numerous pedagogical and theoretical texts
stress the importance of acting and illustrate an exhaustive vocabulary of gesture. Yet
such texts provide only a limited sense of the exact actions employed by singers, and
today, many decisions about historical acting remain open to speculation. Some scholars,
most recently, Richard King (2008) and Jed Wentz (2009), have proposed ways to
envision onstage movement. King and Wentz concur that gesture serves to communicate
affective meaning, but they do not agree about the particulars of baroque theater and
aesthetics. Indeed, their respective analyses of Act 1, Scene 9 from Handel’s Alessandro
differ significantly: where King sees a character expressing aversion, Wentz sees extreme
rage, and where King reads sincere reverence, Wentz reads deception. Their analyses
present close, if conflicting readings of individual words and phrases in the libretto.
However, neither King nor Wentz accounts for the musical setting: the recitativo
semplice.
This paper examines the musical components of Handel’s recitative to enrich
prevailing scholarly theories about gesture. Handel’s scores include far more stage
directions than do those of his contemporaries. Most of these instructions––which typify
some of the gestures described in contemporary treatises on acting––appear in the simple
recitative and occur in coordination with communicative musical devices, such as
agitated disjunct melodies when a character runs (corre). This relationship between
musical detail and directed onstage movement sheds some light on the actions of the title
character of Alessandro, a young impetuous leader, who acts with more childish fury than
kingly dignity. This nuanced character profile of Alessandro emerges from a study of the
simple recitative, in which the music is closely linked with and sometimes indicative of
the physical movements of the performer.
III. SSCM Session: Heaven and Hell
Kimberlyn Montford (Trinity University), Chair
Representing Chaos: The Infernal Dance in 17th-Century Italian Opera
Aliyah M. Shanti (Princeton University)
Hell, in the early modern period, was universally conceived of as crowded, an
understanding that stems from a long literary and theological tradition of the teeming
masses of damned spirits traceable at least as early as Homer. In 17th-century Italian
opera, the crowding of Hell is expressed through scenes of collective action, especially
those involving dance and choruses. Balli and other forms of collective spectacle were far
more common in infernal scenes than elsewhere in Italian opera, and the presence of a
large number of people on stage became the most important marker of Hell in early
opera, even more so than the requisite scenery. The infernal ballo and crowd scene were
so important to representing hell that librettists would go to great lengths to include them,
including additional set changes at the ends of acts, as in Aurelio Aureli’s 1671
adaptation of Giovanni Andrea Moniglia’s Ercole in Tebe.
In this paper, I will demonstrate how the collective nature of Hell ties these
infernal scenes to the long tradition of crowded Hells in European literature and theology,
including the contemporaneous, post-Tridentine conceptions of damnation. Drawing
upon librettos, scores, and archival sources, I consider the hell scenes from a number of
operas on the Italian peninsula between 1630-1670, including such works as both
Moniglia and Aureli’s Ercole in Tebe, Carlo Pallavicino and Matteo Noris’ Galieno, and
Francesco Cavalli and Orazio Persiani’s Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo. I show how these
crowded, spectacular portrayals of hell, so often placed at the end of the penultimate acts,
actually contributed to the dramatic structures of the operas in which they are found. My
paper also examines the markers, both visual and musical, that distinguished the infernal
ballo from the many other types of ballo in 17th-century opera. In so doing, I show how
creators of opera drew their inspiration less from the disorganized Hells of postTridentine theology, and more from humanist poets writing in the tradition of Dante, so
that operatic Hells are not so much chaotic as they are stylized representations of
disorder.
Canceled: Heavenly Dissonance: Neoplatonic Listening Practice in a Villancico by
Joan Cererols, c. 1660
Andrew A. Cashner (University of Chicago)
The villancico poem Suspended, cielos, vuestro dulce canto (Suspend, O
heavens, your sweet chant) was set to music by eight Hispanic composers between 1651
and about 1710. This text for Christmas exhorts the celestial spheres to cease their music
and listen, because “the newest consonance” has entered the world in the birth of Christ.
The voice of the baby Jesus will sound the tuning pitch for the “new song” of a restored
creation.
The one surviving musical setting was composed by Joan Cererols around 1660
and probably first performed by the virtuoso ensemble of the choir school at the Abbey of
Montserrat near Barcelona. (The author has made the first critical edition based on
previously undiscovered sources.) Cererols matches the poem’s discourse about music
with a discourse in music. He constructs a hierarchy of stylistic topics that reflect the
Neoplatonic chain of being. The singers perform the concept of “celestial counterpoint”
with an eight-voice fugue in the old style, which contrasts with a more soloistic, modern
style that seems to represent worldly music. In one striking passage, describing Christ as
“the newest consonance,” the soprano repeatedly sings the word consonancia on
unprepared dissonances.
The musical rhetoric of Cererols expresses and enacts Neoplatonic beliefs about
music that were widespread in early modern Catholicism. Neoplatonic theologians like
Fray Luis de Granada and speculative theorists like Athanasius Kircher described music
as an embodiment of God’s perfect order. Listening to music could be a way to “read the
book of creation” and thereby come to know its Creator. But what was the place of
dissonance in that ordered system? How could listeners hear heavenly perfection in the
dissonance of earthly music?
The paper argues that Cererols uses dissonance as an ironic symbol. He
emphasizes the imperfect artifice of earthly music in order to point beyond it. The higher
music of Heaven would not be governed by earthly rules, and would be audible only by
faith. Through close musical and poetic analysis within the context of contemporary
theological literature, this paper demonstrates how a villancico could serve as a vehicle
for Neoplatonic listening practice.
IV. AHS Session: Transmission and Transformation
Nicholas Lockey (Sam Houston University), Chair
The Babel[l]s, Between Hanover and London
Rebekah Ahrendt (Yale University)
“My dear and well-beloved son, William Babell,” wrote Charles Babel in his will.
The two must have been close: Charles trained William in the arts of performance and
music copying from a young age; the two played together in the orchestras of Drury Lane
and the Haymarket; and together they formed part of London’s finest band of foreign
performers, the band that enabled the institution of opera in London.
To date, the Babels have been an interesting side note in histories of 17th and 18th
century music, especially scholarship on Lully and Handel. Charles is recognized as a
primary transmitter for Continental music in Britain. William, on the other hand, is best
known as an arranger of Handel’s music and an early composer of keyboard concertos.
And yet little is known about the Babel family before their arrival in London around
1700.
Recently discovered documents clarify Charles’s sources and William’s
upbringing. William’s mother was Parisian, and William was born in Hanover (not
London). Between Hanover and London was The Hague, where the family settled early
1693. Surprisingly, this Catholic family chose to convert to French Calvinism in 1696, a
move that led directly to their successes in London. Charles became English by virtue of
having served in William III’s Guards and Grenadiers, which required being a Protestant.
Intentionally or not, Babel’s conversion caused others to identify him as a Huguenot
refugee, which likely aided his acceptance in the London theaters.
Beyond biographical detail, however, the documents I have discovered speak of a
deep connection to the musical communities of Hanover and beyond. They indicate that
much of Charles’ repertoire was acquired in the Dutch Republic, from connections to
private households or the Amsterdam publishing houses. Babel’s manuscripts reveal that
he passed his skill and repertoire on to his son. Valued for their experience, for their
talents as performers and copyists, Babel and son were at the forefront of a generation of
foreign-born musicians who transformed musical life in London and paved the way for
Handel.
How the March from Handel’s Riccardo Primo became an Early Methodist Hymn
Stephen Nissenbaum (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Handel’s opera Riccardo Primo closed in late 1727 after only eleven London
performances, never to be revived there in the composer’s lifetime. Yet 15 years later, the
opera’s third act March appeared, improbably, in the earliest Methodist tune-book, The
Foundery Collection (1742), compiled by John and Charles Wesley. The March tune was
printed there, without attribution, simply as “Jericho Tune.” It was subsequently
redeployed many times during John Wesley’s lifetime and beyond, set to the words of a
hymn, written in 1741 by his brother Charles, that opened with the lines “Soldiers of
Christ, arise / And put your Armour on.” In that form, Handel’s March became and
remained widely familiar to a most unlikely public. My paper explores this process, and
considers a plausible meaning for that curious title, “Jericho Tune.”
In preparing the tune for publication in 1742, the Wesley brothers probably used a
published recorder score. The Riccardo Primo March had been reprinted over the years,
sometimes in arrangements for solo recorder—an instrument that both of the Wesley
brothers played. (I have discovered that John Wesley practiced numbers from both
Ottone and Giulio Cesare; he even attended a performance of Esther given at Oxford
during Handel’s celebrated visit there in July 1733.)
I believe that the Wesleys’ 1742 title “Jericho Tune” can be traced to Charles
Wesley. First off, Charles was singularly preoccupied with the Biblical story of Jericho in
the years 1740-42. He not only preached on the subject but also wrote (and published as a
broadsheet) a lengthy hymn titled “The Taking of Jericho,” which, significantly, treated
that Biblical story as a parable of a Methodist’s personal struggle against inbred
sinfulness—as an assault on “the Jericho within.” And Charles Wesley’s hymn “Soldiers
of Christ arise”—the text that came to be associated with the Handel March—was itself a
militant portrayal of the conquest of private sinfulness.
But why the association of the Jericho story with the March from Riccardo
Primo? My conjecture, based on circumstantial evidence, is that in December 1727
Charles Wesley (then a somewhat louche Oxford freshman) attended a performance of
Riccardo. The staging was impressive and expensive. Its high point came in the final act,
when the English army successfully assaulted a walled city in Cyprus. Depicted with
sophisticated stage machinery, this Jericho-like scene—the wall came tumbling down—
could have left a powerful impression on the young Charles Wesley, who (as I speculate)
may have recalled it when he began to ponder the Biblical story of Jericho a dozen years
later. Hence, perhaps, the improbable merging of a Methodist hymn and a Handel
march—“Jericho Tune.”
V. AHS Session: Ancients and Moderns
Robert Kendrick (University of Chicago), Chair
Reading Gesualdo as Horace:
Leone Santi’s Comparatione della moderna con l’antica musica
Jeffrey Levenberg (Skidmore College)
As the early seventeenth-century professor of theology and opera composer Leone
Santi opened Gesualdo’s madrigals alongside Horace’s odes, he embarked on an
inevitable humanist inquiry; after all, the ancient poet and the modern musician both
hailed from Venosa. But Santi’s motivation to compare the works of these two great
Venosians for the first time was more profound: He had to demonstrate once and for all
that modern music must preserve the syllabic, metrical, and clearly enunciated style of
ancient music, as decreed by the Council of Trent. Santi’s agenda was unique among
scholars working under Barberini’s patronage, a collective that, as Frederick Hammond
has shown, cultivated the earliest academic interests in Gesualdo. By way of contrast,
Giambattista Doni and Athanasius Kircher sought to explicate Gesualdo’s chromaticism
by means of enharmonic mutations of ancient Greek modes, but paid little attention to
matters of rhythm. Santi (one of Doni’s dedicatees) must have also been seeking out
precedents to his new melodramatic technique, “metris confusaneis ad harmoniam,” a
knotty phrase that Margaret Murata, in the only musicological consideration of Santi to
date, aptly translates as “in mixed metres for music.” Unfortunately, Santi’s manuscript
treatise was long missing. According to Patrizio Barbieri, it was seemingly last
mentioned by Pietro della Valle in 1649. In fact, this vital testament of musical humanism
is now preserved in the Francisco Barbieri archive at the Biblioteca Nacional de España
and awaits study.
My paper provides the first examination of Leone Santi’s Comparatione della
moderna con l’antica musica, an unknown source on early seventeenth-century
madrigals, opera, and music theory. Focusing in particular on Santi’s selection and
reading of Gesualdo’s setting of Torquato Tasso’s Mentre, mia stella miri, I will
introduce the humanist and post-Tridentine ideologies underlying his treatise. As Santi
endorses Gesualdo’s Roman imitator Antonio Cifra above all, I will explicate his
comparison of Cifra’s Chiare stelle tutte belle with Horace’s Dianam tenerę dicite
virgines. Ultimately, I will reveal that Gesualdo’s sacred music—which the Barberini
scholars apparently did not have access to—in fact violates Santi’s theories; Santi’s postTridentine appeal to the Prince of Venosa was grievously mistaken.
Ripa’s Iconologia as a Source for Baroque Musical Rhetoric
Barbara Russano Hanning (CUNY and Julliard)
At the turn of the 17th-century, a century obsessed with naming and classifying
everything in the universe including abstract concepts like the passions of the soul,
Cesare Ripa published his Iconologia—a systematic collection of nearly 700 concepts
that describes and prescribes, through personification, ways to represent those concepts
pictorially. First published in Rome in 1593, and reprinted in all the principal European
languages throughout the 17th and into the 18th century, it became a manual for painters
and sculptors and is still the best guide for any iconographic study of Baroque art and, by
extension, as I will argue, of the affections and gestures represented in Baroque music.
By connecting Ripa’s images to the musical vocabulary of the passions, such as the three
genera or affective categories outlined by Monteverdi in the early 17th-century—
concitato, temperato, and molle—we can gain insight into their deployment by Baroque
composers of vocal chamber music and opera well into the eighteenth century.
For example, Monteverdi associated his newly invented concitato genre with the
expression of warlike sentiments (as in his madrigali guerrieri) and with the affection of
ira or rage. The personification of Rage in Ripa’s Iconologia is an armed man of a wild
and terrifying appearance, a belligerent warrior, striding forward with a bared sword in
one hand and a shield in the other. Twisted around his plumed helmet is a serpent, which
also signifies rage “for the minute the creature feels himself endangered or offended he
falls into a state of terrible anger and does not rest until he has spewed forth all his venom
into the offender.” The metaphor of the serpent, and in fact Ripa’s exact words, were
used in a very literal fashion by the librettist of Handel’s Giulio Cesare for the rage aria
sung by Pompey’s vengeful son Sesto in Act II. Constructed as a simile aria, “L’angue
offeso mai riposa” compares Sesto’s inner state to the provoked serpent and its
convoluted shape (twisted around the figure’s helmet) probably even prompted the
writhing bass line Handel composed to accompany Sesto’s words.
Thus, whereas the Iconologia has been seen primarily as a source for Baroque
artists, this and similar examples illustrate the currency and sway that Ripa’s images
exercised on the musico-theatrical rhetoric of the Baroque era as well.
Friday Afternoon
VI. Plenary Session: Perspectives on French Style
Antonia Banducci (University of Denver), Chair
Quel désordre soudain!: The Eloquence of Disorder in the Lullian Tragédie en musique
Jonathan Gibson (James Madison University)
The title of my paper references a moment in the prologue of Lully and Quinault’s Cadmus et Hermione (1673) during which a gathering of rustic dancers and singers flee the subterranean rumblings that accompany the entrance of l’Envie. This carefully engineered juxtaposition of personae and of expressive modes at the outset of the pair’s first tragédie en musique prefigures remarkably similar collisions between pastoral and tragic characters—and forcible silencings of the former by the latter—throughout Quinault and Lully’s collaborative career, culminating most famously in act 2 of Roland (1685). Appearing occasionally in prologues, but more often at the conclusion of select divertissements, these expressive “nodes” typically involve a violent or disordered challenge to “artificial” expression and to those characters who seek to foster it within the work’s narrative. I begin this paper by surveying relevant moments within selected tragédies en musique of Lully and Quinault. While the expressive collisions I describe make for engaging theatre, to regard this convention merely as a dramatic device is to ignore its broader implications. The most obvious and well-­‐documented of these involves a desire to remind listeners of the pastorale’s subservient place in the new theatrical hierarchy, amounting to a kind of generic metacommentary already heralded in the prologue of Lully and Quinault’s first collaborative enterprise, the pastorale Les Fêtes de l’amour et de Bacchus (1672). But more consequential, I argue, is that this convention invokes the same broad aesthetic distinction that infused most French art forms of the late-­‐seventeenth century between competing notions of “natural” and “artificial” expression. While a few music-­‐centered texts from the period elucidate this dichotomy, the era’s most exhaustive explanations are found within writings on eloquence, including René Rapin’s Réflexions sur l’éloquence (1671), Bernard Lamy’s L’Art de parler (1675), René Bary’s Méthode pour bien prononcer un discours (1679), and François Fénelon’s Dialogues sur l’éloquence (c.1679). I conclude, then, that we might regard the musical-­‐dramatic moments cited here as potent manifestations of an aesthetic dichotomy revealed most explicitly in late seventeenth-­‐century discourses on eloquence. Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s “Choirs”: Clues to their Size and Disposition
Shirley Thompson (Birmingham Conservatoire)
Although Charpentier left few significant writings on performance practice, the
main corpus of his autograph manuscripts—the 28-volume Mélanges autographes—
contains a wealth of evidence to inform present-day performers. Given that a huge
proportion of his output comprises music for voices, clues to vocal scoring and
performance are particularly valuable. While previous studies have examined aspects of
this phenomenon, there has been no full-scale survey of the range of relevant information
across the Mélanges. This paper presents some of the findings of such a study, focusing
on the composer’s sacred music.
First, we should acknowledge the sheer diversity of the choral formations in
Charpentier’s sacred vocal works. Much of this diversity is explained by the “portfolio”
nature of the composer’s career: he did not hold a permanent post at Louis XIV’s court,
working instead for a range of patrons and performing groups, all with different
performing forces.
In a few cases, contextual evidence allows us to establish the exact numbers and
disposition of the singers. More often, however, this is not possible, even when the
commissioning institution can be identified: while the approximate number of “resident”
musicians in a given ensemble may be calculated from archival sources, the practice of
reinforcing these with supernumeraries introduces some uncertainty.
Consequently, the best information on the size of the group that Charpentier
envisaged for a given work is usually provided by his own annotations in the
manuscripts—annotations whose meaning may not be immediately obvious to the nonspecialist. Examination of such markings reveals a wide variety in the size of the
ensembles involved in the first performances—from essentially one-to-a-part ensembles
to those comprising two dozen singers or more, and from equally balanced polychoral
dispositions to a distinctive petit chœur / grand chœur layout. Moreover, such petit
chœurs range from single voices to multiple singers per part.
While such information is abundant in Charpentier’s case, it is lacking for other
French composers during this period. Yet in identifying the variety of choral scoring in
ecclesiastical contexts outside the court, the present study has clear relevance beyond the
works of this single composer.
Agostino Steffani and the French Style: New Perspectives
Graham Sadler (University of Hull)
At the age of 24, Steffani was sent by the Elector of Bavaria on a study-visit to
Paris, where he stayed for up to ten months between the summer of 1678 and the spring
of 1679. Although little is known of his activities there, Steffani would have had ample
opportunity to hear music by Lully (Psyché and Bellérophon were staged during those
months) and by Charpentier and many others. After his return to Munich, Steffani
evidently continued to take an interest in musical developments in France. The extent to
which he absorbed elements of French style and technique is abundantly apparent in his
operas, particularly those written for the Francophile courts at Munich and Hanover,
which include French overtures and numerous Lullian ballet movements and arias in
dance meter. French influence is also apparent in aspects of Steffani’s orchestration.
The present paper identifies specific French pieces that may have influenced the
Italian composer, examining these alongside equivalent movements from his Munich and
Hanover operas. It reveals the many respects in which Steffani creatively adapted his
models and assimilated Gallic features into his own distinctive idiom, often in ways that
prefigure Handel. Special emphasis is given to those aspects of French influence that
have hitherto escaped attention, including Steffani’s use of muted strings, his manner of
indicating ornaments, and his attitude towards the addition of spontaneous
embellishments. For the benefit of his mainly Francophone players at Hanover, the
composer’s autograph scores include numerous annotations in French, whose
implications are here reassessed. From his use of the terms violons, hautes-contre, tailles
and basses de violon, it becomes clear that the Hanover orchestra was set up in the fourpart layout that was standard for French orchestras other than those with royal
associations – a conclusion supported by the instrumental tessituras and choice of clefs.
Circumstantial evidence also suggests that Steffani’s use of a distinctive combination of
wind instruments including bass recorder derives from certain Charpentier motets, which
the Italian composer may have encountered in the Dauphin’s private chapel.
Saturday Morning
VII. AHS Session: Handel and the Oratorio
Ellen Harris (M.I.T. & President of AMS), Chair
Esther II from 1735 – 1740
Annette Landgraf (Hallische Händel Ausgabe)
Esther II wordbooks (the new version of 1732) have survived for performances in
London in 1732, 1733, 1751 and 1757 as well as Oxford in 1733, and Dublin in 1742. In
addition the work has been given in London (Covent Garden) in 1735 (5, 7, 12, 13, 19, 21
March), 1736 (7, 14 April) and 1737 (6, 7 April); and in Lincoln’s Inn Fields on the 26
March 1740. We know that Handel produced a bilingual version because some of his new
Italian singers could not sing in English. No wordbooks are known for the performances
between 1735 and1740. The performing score has constantly been adapted, and there are
traces from the different performances (singer’s names and musical changes), but some
of the original folios have been replaced and many of them are now missing.
On 5th March 1735 The London Daily Post printed the following advert: “At the
Theatre Royal in Covent-Garden, this present Wednesday […] will be perform’d an
Oratorio, call’d Aesther. With several New additional Songs; Likewise two new
Concert’s on the Organ.”
The reference to the “New additional Songs” suggests that the Italian arias, which
are ascribed to the performances in 1737 by Winton Dean, could already have been
prepared for an earlier year.
David Vickers has already established a hypothetical version for these
performances. On the basis of the musical sources the paper will present an independent
proposal for a plausible order of the movements for the forthcoming edition of Esther II
and this will be discussed in the light of existing theories.
Handel, Walsh and the publication of Messiah
Donald Burrows (The Open University)
The chapter on ‘Printed Editions’ in Watkins Shaw’s A textual and Historical
Companion to Handel’s “Messiah” (1965) gives a masterly summary of the publication
of music from Messiah during Handel’s lifetime, although for the purpose of his edition
Shaw concluded that this area of sources did not provide much useful material for his
edition. Nevertheless, the history of the early publication (and non-publication) of
Messiah remains intriguing. When did Walsh receive copy, and what did his copy look
like? When was Songs in Messiah engraved, and in what ways (if any) did it differ from
other comparable Walsh editions of Handel’s music? When did Walsh plan to publish it,
and why was there a delay? What sort of public and performers were expected to
purchase and use the music? A few new relevant pieces of evidence have come to
attention since 1965, relating to Handel’s working relationship with Walsh junior, but
answers to most of these questions must still remain speculative. This paper will review
what is knowable about the early publication of Messiah, and what may reasonably be
inferred from the musical evidence. It will also present the results of a fresh examination
of the relevant printed editions, with particular attention to Walsh’s music engravers and
his paper stocks.
The London Revisions of Handel’s First Roman Oratorio:
Il trionfo del Tempo e della Verità (1737) and The Triumph of Time and Truth (1757)
Matthew Gardner (Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main)
Handel revisited his first Italian oratorio Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno
(HWV 46a), written in early 1707, on two occasions during his later career. Firstly in
1737 when it was extensively reworked into Il trionfo del Tempo e della Verità (HWV
46b) to suit his London audience and secondly in 1757 when the 1737 version formed the
basis for the English oratorio The Triumph of Time and Truth (HWV 71), adapted
according to Handel’s instructions by John Christopher Smith and almost certainly in
close collaboration with the librettist Thomas Morell. Both the 1737 and 1757
adaptations required a range of alterations to fit their new contexts, and both works were
also revived with further changes in 1739 and 1758 respectively.
While structural alterations made to Il trionfo del Tempo e della Verità in 1737/9
and its redevelopment into The Triumph of Time and Truth in 1757/8 have been
catalogued by Roland Dieter Schmidt (who examined the sources thoroughly), and
elements have been summarised by Anthony Hicks and Artie Heinrich, there is presently
no scholarly literature that offers critical observations about the variety of factors that
informed or influenced Handel’s choices. This paper therefore presents a survey based on
a reassessment of the relevant sources (autographs, performing scores, wordbooks and
some secondary sources), documenting the peculiar evolution of the work from its 1707
Roman origins into Il trionfo del Tempo e della Verità and The Triumph of Time and
Truth. Using select examples, the reasons why Handel chose to revisit Il trionfo del
Tempo e del Disinganno under different circumstances will be considered, offering
suggestions for a logical classification of his numerous types of artistic revisions, such as
those that were dictated by the availability of singers or instrumentalists, enforced by the
libretto’s transformation from Italian to English, or were indicative of changing
conventions in musical entertainments designed for London’s theatres. As a result,
valuable new light will be shed on a hitherto under-appreciated oratorio that has seldom
been included fully in the canon of Handel’s London theatre works.
The Synthesis of Traditions, Genres and Styles in Handel’s Jephtha
Kenneth Nott (Hartt School of Music)
Handel’s Jephtha brings together a number of strands found in earlier works.
Most notably, it is Handel’s last victory oratorio, that is, it tells the story of Israel’s
triumph over an oppressive enemy under the leadership of a charismatic leader. By the
time of Jephtha, Handel’s victory oratorios had come to display a range of conventional
aria and chorus types: choral laments and supplications, calls to arms, heroic battle arias,
choruses of praise and thanksgiving. Furthermore, the plots of theses victory stories tend
to follow a conventional Old Testament pattern that grants Israel victory after a return
from apostasy to the true covenant with God. Yet, unlike some other victory oratorios by
Handel, especially Judas Maccabaeus, Jephtha continues the trend of his last few
oratorios by featuring a cast of fully fleshed out, operatically conceived characters who,
despite inhabiting a biblical story, display a realistic, imperfect humanity. The impact of
the title character’s vow on his family and community fulfills a fundamental Aristotelian
precept (that pity and terror are most intense when tragedy affects family members) while
at the same time emphasizing a basic theme of the Old Testament, namely, the
vulnerability of human institutions such as the family. Finally, several critics have
remarked on a uniquely spiritual quality that the oratorio shares with its immediate
predecessor, Theodora. These three strands: victory narrative, realistic characterization
and spiritual depth are synthesized in a way that occurs in no other oratorio by Handel.
Through a detailed comparison of Jephtha with the earlier victory oratorio, Judas
Maccabaeus, I hope to demonstrate how this final biblical adaptation by Handel and
librettist Thomas Morell integrates the moralistic Old Testament victory pattern with a
human story of great poignancy and complexity.
VIII. SSCM Session: Performance Practice I: Bon gout
Michele Cabrini (Hunter College), Chair
St Lambert’s Harpsichord Treatise and Tasteful Conversation: What the Conversational
Writings of Polite Society Say Concerning Good Taste in Performance
Margot Martin (Mt. San Antonio College)
In his famous 1702 treatise on the harpsichord, St Lambert makes several
references at key points in the discussion as to the importance of following good taste in
performance, but does little to clarify of what this good taste consists and how it applies
in any practical sense to performance. Other music treatises of the day are equally silent
on the matter as well. However, a multiplicity of treatises on conversation do exist from
seventeenth-century France that address the matter in great detail, and are replete with
information on the subject, offering many examples of good (and bad) taste in a practical
setting. These conversational treatises were designed to serve as handbooks on artful and
tasteful expression in polite society and often make comparisons with musical practices,
and so can be used as guidelines for good taste in musical performance, especially with
regard to expression and ornamentation. Drawing on the writings of two key
conversational writers in seventeenth-century France, the Chevalier de Méré and
Mademoiselle de Scudéry, this paper explains the properties and elements of good taste
as conceived by the members of polite society, who were also the main patrons of the
harpsichord. It demonstrates the parallels between the two aural arts of music and
conversation, showing direct connections between St Lambert’s thoughts on various
musical practices such as notes inégales, the brisé style, unmeasured preludes, movement
and expression, and ornamentation and improvisation, and Méré’s and Scudéry’s
guidelines for good taste in conversation through the social principles of delicacy,
agrément (grace and charm), convenance (suitablilty), bienséance (regard for context,
audience, and personal ability), and rapport (unity and interior cohesion). It illustrates
how St Lambert’s thoughts on these matters directly reflect the reigning philosophies of
good taste developed in the salons of polite society, and offers practical guidelines and
examples for the modern performer on how these principles of taste can be readily
applied to musical performance today.
The Art of Singing Well: Bertrand de Bacilly and Issues of Amateur Performance
Practice in Seventeenth-Century France
Michael Bane (Case Western Reserve)
Scholars and performers have long turned to Bertrand de Bacilly’s treatise
Remarques curieuses sur l'art de bien chanter (1668) for details of seventeenth-century
French singing. While Bacilly committed most of the treatise to what he thought singers
should do, he also wrote at length of what his own students stubbornly did anyway. These
musical practices, disapproved of by Bacilly yet prevalent among the noble amateurs he
instructed, informed his own engagement with music to a high degree, and his treatise is
a compendium of the hidden and often scorned conventions dear to the amateur musician.
In this paper, I reconstruct from this and related pedagogical texts the performance
practices endemic to amateur singers and discuss their repercussions for the performance
of song in seventeenth-century France.
The priorities of amateurs differed from those of their professional instructors. For
the gens de qualité who performed at court or salon gatherings, social considerations
often trumped musical ones as the rules of civility strictly delimited their public displays.
In particular, the performer’s face was to exude a graceful calm devoid of ugly
contortions. The pedagogue Pierre Borjon de Scellery went so far as to recommend that
amateurs prone to grimacing wear bridles to tame their errant muscles. The physical
restraint demanded of amateurs had measurable effects on their performance of music.
Bacilly complained that some of his students were so wary of grimacing or otherwise
spoiling their appearance that they refused to correctly pronounce certain consonants,
vowels, and syllables. Such issues necessarily influenced the production of musical
sound, and I demonstrate the ways amateurs negotiated the competing demands of
musicianship and social etiquette in performance.
I conclude the paper with two brief performances of an air by Sébastien Le
Camus. The first carefully adheres to Bacilly’s instructions and illustrates how a
professional singer would have performed the piece. The second, on the other hand,
attempts to recreate the sound of an amateur performance. As nonprofessionals
constituted the vast majority of musicians in the early modern period, this conjectural
performance may reveal a heretofore unknown sound typical of most seventeenth-century
performances of French song.
IX. SSCM Session: Performance Practices II: Music for the Eyes and the Ears
Michael Dodds (University of North Carolina School of the Arts), Chair
Absolute Tempos, Liminal Rhythms, and Ancient Notational Superfluities in
Late-Seicento Sonatas
Gregory Barnett (Rice University)
The musical notation of the late seventeenth-century preserves accumulated layers
of meaning that include overdesigned redundancies of tempo indications, vague
approximations of rhythmic detail, and ambiguities, even contradictions, in the uses of
mensurations and time signatures. My paper focuses on the interpretation of tempo and
rhythm in printed sonatas of the late seventeenth century. I begin with a summary of the
evidence that shows, on the one hand, the assumption among sonata composers of pulse
equivalence between diverse meters (e.g., Francesco Prattichista, Op. 1, 1666)—
described by Franz-Jochen Machatius as the spielmännische Reduktion—and, on the
other hand, the clear use of proportional tempo relationships between individual parts and
movements, especially in canons and selected dances (e.g., G. M. Bononcini, Op. 4,
1671). Both approaches, as I will show, are transmitted in the notational habits of the
famous and influential sonata composer, Arcangelo Corelli, including a hybrid tendency
of associating tempo ranges with specific meters.
Turning next to questions of rhythm, Corelli's own approximative notational
approach is borne out by comparing the rhythmic freedom in his Op. 5 embellishments
with those of his contemporaries. There is, however, a more widespread freedom of
rhythmic interpretation to be found in the notation of dances, and, in this context, Corelli
emerges as relatively strict in his practice. Taking the giga as the most extreme case of
notational variety (it is seen in no fewer than nine different meters among different
composers), I show that its alternately duple, triple, compound, or mixed meters reflect a
tangled history of giga subgenres and reveal a performance practice of shifting or even
liminal rhythms between triplet and dotted motifs. In sum, a harder look at the notation of
Corelli's time recasts at least some of his music as novel to us, and possibly strange.
Fretting Pattern Iconography and Temperament: Something or Nothing?
David Dolata (Florida International University)
For instruments with moveable frets such as the lute and viol, the only visual
evidence we have that shows rather than tells us how the frets were arranged is
iconography such as paintings, drawings, and book illustrations. Though at a very
inchoate stage of its development, research into iconographical representations offers
promise in helping to discern which temperaments were used on fretted instruments
during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.
With the aid of numerous to-scale diagrams and color illustrations of primarily
seventeenth-century paintings, this presentation will identify fretboard patterns that can
generate a practical temperament and describe those that actually do appear in
iconography, pointing out where the two categories intersect. It will further examine
factors that influence the production and perception of iconographical fretboard patterns,
explain the very practical reasons some depictions could produce no workable
temperament, and suggest criteria that can help us separate artworks that inspire further
research from those that do not.
Untangling and classifying the thicket of fretboard patterns illustrated in period
paintings will likely require skills in 3D imaging, the perspective of an artist, the
experience of a player, the contextual awareness of a musicologist, the organizational
ability of a field general, and the patience of Job. My ultimate goal in this presentation is
to introduce the listeners to the tools that will enable them to begin judging for
themselves whether a particular fretboard pattern depicted in a painting or drawing might
mean nothing, anything, or something.
Saturday Afternoon
X. Plenary session: Birds, Women, and Seventeenth-Century Devotion
Christine Getz (University of Iowa), Chair
Songs of the Pious Lark: Music, Nature, and Devotional Practice in Early
Seventeenth-Century France
Brian Scott Oberlander (Northwestern University)
Based on archival work conducted at the Newberry Library of Chicago and the
Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, this presentation deals with several collections of
Catholic devotional song published in early seventeenth-century France. While they
contain the odes, cantiques, and chansons spirituelles typical of devotional publications
from this period, they employ a dense ornithological vocabulary to introduce and
describe their music. In a series of richly allusive poems, epistles, and other prefatory
materials, these curious volumes articulate a program of daily spiritual exercise in which
larks and nightingales serve as models of chaste music-making for the devotee.
I begin by following a network of intertextual cues that refer the devotee to
passages from contemporary sermons and devotional manuals, all likening the Godly soul
to a mellifluous bird in flight. Many collections feature engravings to this effect on their
frontispieces, which present larks and nightingales arrayed around a heavenly throne with
beaks agape. Establishing dynamic affinities between the act of singing and the
transcendence of earthbound flesh, the editors thus create an elaborate discursive
framework for the devotee’s performance.
I claim that the avian collections represent an emergent devotional epistemology,
marked by the influence of François de Sales, in which identification with figures of the
natural world served to guide the devotee into an ideal relationship with the devotional
text. I also suggest that the editors were responding to ecclesiastical doubts about the
ambiguous provenance of their music, the pious larks and seraphic nightingales offered
as exempla that would justify the singing of contrafacts. Charged with a great deal of
rhetorical, discursive, and phenomenological work, as it were, the birds gracing these
verdant prefatory landscapes invite us to reexamine the place of music and self in early
seventeenth-century devotional practice. Indeed, they are inscribed at the intersection of
printed text, singing body, and Christian soul.
Old Testament Women in the Roman Oratorio
Margaret Murata (University of California, Irvine)
Although women could not attend devotions in most of the oratories in 17th-century
Rome, central female figures peopled the Biblical stories heard in music, whether at
Phillip of Neri’s oratory, the archconfraternity of the SS. Crocifisso, or in private homes
and noble chapels. This paper considers musical appearances of the Old Testament
figures of Esther, Susanna, and the daughter of Jephtha (Judith has been extensively
treated) within the penitential context of Lent, the season in which oratorios were most
performed. Ahasuerus’s queen Esther appears in a Barberini production of 1632, in Pietro
Della Valle’s setting of 1640 that used Greek tunings, and in later libretti by Domenico
Benigni, Giovanni Lotti, and Lelio Orsini, the latter with a surviving score by Stradella.
Susanna and Jephtha’s daughter by comparison were powerless women. Only the libretto
to Bencini’s 1698 Susanna … vindicata seems to have survived. Jephtha’s daughter
appears in numerous Roman musical treatments in both Italian and Latin, from the late
1620s in a libretto by Ottavio Tronsarelli to two given in 1703 at the oratories of the
Crocifisso and S. Girolamo, not to mention Caldara’s settings of 1715 and 1716. This
necessarily compressed examination shows that the oratorios presenting these Hebrew
women were not crafted with single, emblematic meanings. The different dramatic and
musical situations imposed on them represented different Lenten “lessons.” This is made
more evident by a general comparison of them with musical portraits of Christian female
martyrs from pagan Imperial Rome—Agnes, Irene, Catherine and Theodora.
Sunday Morning
XII. Plenary session: Operatic networks
Maria Purciello (University of Delaware), chair
Il ritorno di Cavalli in patria
Jennifer Williams Brown (Grinnell College)
In the summer of 1662, Francesco Cavalli came home to Venice swearing never
to write another opera. He had just spent two years in Paris fulfilling a commission from
Mazarin to compose a monumental spectacle for the marriage of Louis XIV (Ercole
amante). Fortunately, however, Cavalli changed his mind and completed another six
operas before his death fourteen years later.
Why would the world’s leading opera composer suddenly want to quit, at what
was arguably the high point of his career? Most scholars have followed Henry Prunières
(1913) in concluding that Cavalli was disappointed by the reception the French had given
his music and decided to quit in a grand sort of “sour grapes” gesture. Thomas Walker
suggested another explanation—that Cavalli’s decision “may just as well reflect his large
financial reward from the French court (including a diamond ring ‘bizzarramente e
gentilmente lavorato’), which would have freed him from any necessity to earn his living
by the composition of operas.” (New Grove 1980)
In this paper I will reexamine both Prunières’s “sour grapes hypothesis” and
Walker’s “diamond ring hypothesis,” using newly-mined data from Cavalli’s financial
and legal papers in the Archivio di Stato in Venice. I will then offer an alternative
explanation, based on documents surrounding the composition and performance of
Scipione Affricano, the first opera Cavalli composed after his return from France. In my
view, Cavalli’s decision to quit opera was a reaction to working not in France, but in
Venice. On the contrary, I believe that he had a largely favorable view of his two-year
sojourn in Paris, and that its musical effects can be seen in Scipione Affricano. An
analysis of Scipione’s opening scenes reveals many similarities with Ercole amante, an
opera whose scale, style, and organization is in many ways exceptional within Cavalli’s
oeuvre.
Erismena Trasportata
Jonathan Glixon (University of Kentucky)
In his magisterial 1968 article Erismena travestita, Harry Powers looked at
various versions of the opera Erismena, with poetry by Aurelio Aureli and music by
Francesco Cavalli. Although Powers discussed briefly some of the non-Venetian
versions, documented primarily by libretti, his main concern was with the great
differences between the 1655 Venetian libretto and score, the libretto for the 1670
Venetian revival, and a score from the 1670s. In my paper, instead, I look in detail at the
ways the opera changed as it traveled around northern Italy outside of Venice after its
premier, in twelve cities between 1656 and 1673. While many aspects of the opera seem
to have remained unchanged from city to city, a number of small but significant
differences make it possible to detect two distinct traditions in transmission, most notably
through different patterns of scenery and varied ballets. It becomes clear, among other
things, that the undated Scenario, usually linked with the 1655 Venetian premier, is more
likely to be connected with the Bologna performance of the following year, otherwise
documented only by a publication of poems in honor of the prima donna, Caterina Porri.
Finally, the patterns of transmission of one scene illuminate the relationships among the
original libretto, a supplement issued in the middle of the first run of performances, and
the early score.
XII. Plenary session: Heinrich Schütz
Gregory Johnston (University of Toronto), Chair
Carnival and Sacred Drama. Schütz’s Christmas Historia and the Transformation of
Christmas in the Second Half of the 17th-Century
Markus Rathey (Yale University)
Studies of the history of the oratorio tend to emphasize the continuity between
works like Heinrich Schütz’s Christmas Historia and later settings of the Christmas
narrative by composers like Bach and Handel. This quest for continuity overshadows the
fact that Christmas underwent a significant transformation in the second half of the 17thcentury. Even after the protestant reformations, European Christmas traditions
maintained numerous features of their medieval practices: like carnivalesque
celebrations, processions, masks, and riotous behavior. This changed during the 17thcentury. In fact, in England and New England the rejection of these folk traditions went
so far that the celebration of Christmas was prohibited by law.
German territories did not take such drastic measures; yet, changes took place
there as well. Popular carnivalesque Christmas plays were prohibited and replaced with a
more internalized devotion that emphasized the individual’s relationship with the
newborn child. This transformation was part of a larger paradigm shift in 17th-century
religiosity, which replaced external and physical displays of piety with internalized
devotional practices. These shifts also included new theologies of corporeality and
gender, which likewise had an impact on the ways in which Christmas was celebrated.
The theological shifts correlate with the rejection of the carnivalesque in the early
modern period, as it was analyzed by Mikhail Bakhtin.
Most of these changes took place in the 1670s and 1680s. Schütz’s Christmas
Historia—which was composed before 1664—represents a transitional phase and retains
some earlier views of Christmas. The most obvious example is the Kindelwiegen
(rocking of the child), the physicality of which was highly suspicious to theologians in
the later 17th-century.
This paper will outline the common Christmas practices in the early 17th-century,
in addition to the theological discussion about their abolition, and it will locate Schütz’
Christmas Historia within the context of these discourses.
Schütz, the Song of Songs, and the Feminization of Piety: A Reappraisal
Janette Tilley (CUNY/Lehman College)
Recent writings about Schütz’s settings of passages from the Song of Songs,
namely SWV 265 “O quam tu pulchra” and SWV 263 “Anima mea liquifacta est” have
put forward the proposition that Schütz’s highly expressive musical settings evince a shift
in the nature of pious expression. These “ravishing” settings both privilege feminine
expression of desire, and establish the feminine as desired object, whose sexuality itself is
treated with a “blend of awe and fear”. This fascination with the unique nature of female
desire has led some to associate Schütz’s settings with a “feminization of piety” and
others with a brand of mysticism, stemming from The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, which
weakened under increasing “secularization” in Europe.
While the “feminization” theory has been successfully problematized with respect
to nineteenth-century religious practice, the validity of its use in describing a process at
work in early modern Protestantism likewise requires reappraisal. Drawing on theological
interpretations of the canticles along with other contemporary writings, this paper seeks
to situate Schütz’s engagement with Song of Song texts within the framework of midseventeenth-century German Lutheran pious practice and mystical traditions. An
understanding of gender as it relates to Protestant metaphysics will challenge prevailing
suppositions of female objectification and explore what it meant to perform gender in a
sacred, specifically Lutheran, context.